#INSTALING PROCESS EXPLORER SOFTWARE#

Finding out which process has a file locked Killing the process tree solves both problems at once. Even when the original process is the true villain of the story, killing it can sometimes leave orphan processes behind that can’t do anything without their parent, but which suck up resources anyway. Instead, one of the child processes it has spawned is the actual bad seed (we’re looking at you, Chrome). Why would you want to kill a whole process tree? Sometimes when a process stalls out, it’s not the real culprit.

Right-click a process, then click Kill Process Tree or select Process > Kill Process Tree or just highlight your process and hit Shift-Del. Process Explorer does one better than the stock Windows Task Manager by giving you the option to kill the entire process tree. This functionality exists in Process Explorer as well, where it’s called Kill Process when you right-click a process. Many people have used Task Manager to end a misbehaving process at some time or another. This list is constantly updating, but if you want to freeze it in time-say, to examine a process that appears and disappears quicker than you can click on it-you can hit the space bar to pause the updates. If you’d prefer an alphabetical listing instead, just click the “process name” column heading.

The processes are presented hierarchically, which means if a process spawns another process, the child process will be listed nested underneath the parent.

#INSTALING PROCESS EXPLORER SOFTWARE#

(Pro tip: Micronsoft is not a legitimate software manufacturer.) You can customize your columns to include more or less information by right-clicking on the column heading, just like any other program with sortable columns. It lists the process name, the process description, CPU and memory usage, and the company name of the software’s creator-something that’s very useful when you’re malware hunting. This shouldn’t be completely unfamiliar if you’ve used the Details tab in Task Manager (aka the Processes tab in Windows XP and earlier).

In the top half of the main window, you’ll see a list of processes.

Instaling Process Explorer